AI Engineering From Scratch is a free, open-source curriculum designed to teach modern AI engineering from first principles through hands-on implementation. The course spans hundreds of lessons across topics such as mathematics, machine learning, language models, tokenization, attention, agents, MCP servers, and autonomous systems. Instead of focusing only on high-level frameworks, it asks learners to build the underlying ideas themselves and produces reusable artifacts such as prompts, skills, agents, and tools throughout the curriculum.

The project can be studied directly or used with coding agents that act as interactive tutors, including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw, and other systems that understand skill files. A placement quiz can map learners to an appropriate starting point, while structured lesson commands guide progress session by session. It is especially suitable for developers who want a long-form, practical path from foundational AI concepts to production-oriented agent engineering while understanding what happens beneath popular libraries.